HC Issues Notice to Govt on Stake in Tobacco Cos

Mumbai: Bombay High Court on Monday issued a notice to the Union government asking it to respond to the public interest litigation (PIL) filed by two trustees of Tata Trust - R Venkataramanan and Laxman Sethuraman- along with five others against public sector asset managers for investing in tobacco companies.

The Court will decide on April 27 whether the PIL can be admitted. The court has asked the top bureaucrat in the ministry of health and family welfare to respond to the PIL.

The PIL called on the high court to direct the public sector insurance companies to divest their shareholding amounting to 76,505 crore from the companies that are directly and indirectly engaged in the tobacco businesses.

Others who are part of the PIL include Sumitra Hooda Pednekar, widow of former Maharashtra minister Satish Pednekar, who died of throat cancer; Pankaj Chaturvedi, professor and surgeon, Tata Memorial Hospital; Abhay Bang, director of the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health; Ashish Deshmukh, member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly and chairman of the No Tobacco Association NGO; and PC Gupta, director of the Healis-Sekhsaria Institute of Public Health. The PIL also asked the court to order the public sector institutions to cease making further investments in any commercial enterprise that is linked with funding, promoting, selling, directly or indirectly controlling or operating a tobacco business.

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